Just before we shifted to the practical aspects of starting the school year, we spent a few days writing about the Common Core’s attention to reading and writing practice. We see much room for students to develop reading and writing habits as they work within the Common Core State Standards. The complexity question, however, rears its head as one begins considering the texts students will read in and out of school.While we find merit in the Common Core’s emphasis on college and career readiness, we wonder whether the lines for reading for school and reading for its own sake should be a bit blurrier. As usual, we have a lot of questions.
- Does pleasure reading have to be from simple texts?
- Does academic reading have to be difficult?
- What about the quality of texts? Is complexity enough?
For us, as we think about shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, and read aloud, the reading in which students engage seems to fall into four quadrants. Please note, these quadrant labels are from a student perspective. When we refer to a text as irrelevant, for example, we mean that a particular student does not see a reason to read it. In many cases, these are the very texts we think most relevant in terms of student learning.
| 1. Complex, but Irrelevant Texts that are complex in some or many ways, but which are not engaging. |
2. Complex and Relevant Texts that are complex in some or many ways and that are interesting/relevant enough that students want to read them. |
| 3. Simple, but Irrelevant Texts that are accessible in some or many ways, but which are not engaging for students. |
4. Simple and Relevant Texts that are accessible in some or many ways and that are interesting/relevant enough that students want to read them. |
While this grid sets up dichotomies of sorts, the good news is that these “opposites” aren’t necessarily opposing, nor does one have to negate the other. The task of the teacher has become to find ways to build a bridge between what the student finds relevant and what the Common Core finds relevant.
[...] Burkins and Yaris present a four-quadrant grid for considering text complexity and simplicity, and the ways text level is related to student engagement and interest. [...]